Kathy HarmonOn March 6, 1976, the body of Kathy Harmon, a newlywed living in Salt Lake City, was found in the canyons north of Interstate 80 in Utah. She had been beaten and strangled during a brutal struggle with her killer, and her body discarded. Many years after her murder, detectives suspected serial killer Ted Bundy may have been responsible.
It was a cold evening on March 2, 1976, Kathy Harmon and a friend dropped by the Better Days Bar in downtown Salt Lake City. The friends were regulars at the neighborhood pub and stopped by for a few drinks that quiet Tuesday night where they were greeted by owner Van Brown, a longtime friend of the Harmon family.
22-year-old Kathy was a newlywed, having only been married for the past six months. Her husband, George David Harmon, had left town recently for a long haul trek through the rugged Mountain West. Harmon worked as a trucker and supermarket meat wrapper. However, he was also the chapter president of the Sundowners, a notorious 1% outlaw biker gang, and went by the nickname “Easy.”
Like her husband, Kathy was considered by friends to be a tough young woman who could handle herself, so when Harmon left town, he knew she would be safe. Kathy had a good group of friends to look after her, including her roommate Vickie. However, that evening at the Better Days Bar, Kathy seemed unhappy.
“They were the only ones in there for a while,” Brown said. “I sat with them for a while. We just talked. She seemed kinda down.” When her friend left early before midnight, Kathy said she wasn’t ready to go home, and her friend offered Kathy her thick winter coat to wear as she walked home, which was only six blocks from the neon lights to her front door.
By the time she decided to leave, it grew cold, with the temperatures downtown only hovered around 21 degrees that night, and so Kathy asked Brown, who she trusted, for a ride. “I said ‘All right,'” Brown recalled. “But she had to wait till I closed up; that was the deal.” Brown went into the kitchen to scrub some dishes.
When he returned, he could not see Kathy Harmon anywhere inside the small 10-stool bar, she was gone. No-one reportedly saw Kathy leave the bar that night, but she evidently did make it home. But what happened to her after that is a mystery, and the next time anyone saw her, was when her body was discovered.
When she failed to turn up for work, Kathy Harmon’s parents grew worried. It was unlike their daughter to not show up, and when they couldn’t reach her by phone, they decided to report her as missing. Police made a stop by her Salt Lake City apartment, and there saw the thick winter coat she had reportedly worn the night she was last seen.
This seemed to indicate that she made it home from the Better Days Bar, but something happened between her return home and the time she would normally start work. When questioned, one of her neighbors gave detectives testimony about a strange vehicle they saw during the early morning, an idling blue Volkswagen Beetle, with a tall, thin man in his 20s stood at the passenger door.
This small clue, although significant, was also broadly unhelpful, with the Volkswagen Beetle an extremely common vehicle at the time, with its production even passing the Ford’s Model T record a few years earlier. It was several days before a break was made in the case, when a body was found in the Utah canyons.
On March 6, 1976, four days after she was last seen, the body of Kathy Harmon was found by a man exercising his dog in the Emigration Canyon-Mountain Dell area north of I-80. The body had been carried, most likely at night, some 300 yards up the still-frozen slopes of Emigration Canyon, then dropped in the snow.
That was where police found her blue jeans, presumably left by her killer. Kathy Harmon’ 115-pound half-nude body was then dragged the rest of the way, some 96 yards, past skiffs of sagebrush, all the way up to the top of the hillside that overlooked Dell Valley, just north of Interstate-80.
It was evident from the crime scene that a struggle had taken place, and that Kathy had fought with her killer. Forensic experts found skin particles underneath her fingernails, as she scratched her attacker who was choking her. She suffered cuts and bruises around the face and head, as well as arms and hands, and although she had a contusion on her head, she died from strangulation.
Beside the body, was her underwear, inside out, and soaked on the waistband with semen, again presumably from her attacker. Her battered, bruised and strangled body was then left on the hillside during a bitter 14-degree March morning. Robbery did not seem the motive, as cash in Kathy’s jeans pocket had been left untouched.
Equally, her necklace was still hanging over her thin jacket on her fully clothed upper body, and her rings, including her wedding ring, were still present. Originally listed as a Jane Doe, the body was soon identified as that of Joy Kathleen “Kathy” Harmon. Her husband was located, and detectives determined he had been out of town when his wife was murdered.
The investigation soon became stymied by the discovery of another similar killing that happened almost at the same time. The same day that Kathy’s body was spotted on the hillside, the beaten, raped and strangled body of 24-year-old Carolyn Sarkessian was found by Salt Lake City officers.
These two murders were initially considered by investigators to be connected to a third murder of a young woman whose body was found in an open pasture near Salt Lake City International Airport on April 1, 1976. That body was later identified as 17-year-old Deborah Diane Smith, last seen in February 1976.
Although a connection with Sarkessian and Smith was later ruled out, the murder of Debbie Smith was eventually considered the work of serial killer Ted Bundy, who at the time of her disappearance, was preparing for his Utah trial for the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch. Detectives looked at other leads, which eventually came to nothing and the case was closed.
Kathy Harmon has, like many other unsolved slayings of young women, been put forward as a possible victim of serial killer Ted Bundy. After killing as many as eight young women in Washington during 1974, Bundy moved to Utah where he continued to kidnap, rape and murder young co-eds, and dumping their bodies in remote areas.
Of his Utah victims, the bodies of very few were ever found, and those who were, had been beaten and strangled, in much the same way Kathy Harmon had been found. One factor that would implicate Ted Bundy with the crime would be the testimony of Harmon’s neighbor, who reported seeing a strange man standing next to a Volkswagen Beetle.
Bundy used his own tan-colored Volkswagen Beetle in many of his crimes, for use in transporting his victims to where he buried them. It was an important part of his modus operandi, and something that made his murders easier to perpetrate. However, the Volkswagen seen that morning was described as blue.
Although Bundy did not own a Blue Volkswagen, he did often borrow his girlfriend, Elizabeth Kloepfer’s Volkswagen, for use in some of his crimes. By the time of Harmon’s murder, Ted Bundy was being investigated by police for a range of crimes, including kidnapping and suspected murder, and he had already been convicted of kidnapping a Utah woman.
It is possible Bundy could have carried out the Harmon murder after his conviction, because it was shortly before he was imprisoned. However, Bundy no longer had access to his own Volkswagen, which had been seized by police, and his girlfriend Liz had, by this time, reported him to police as a potential suspect in the Washington serial murders.
Shortly before his execution, Bundy was questioned about numerous unsolved murders of young women in different states, but it is unknown if Utah detectives ever questioned him about Kathy Harmon’s slaying. Ted Bundy confessed to some thirty murders, including eight in Utah, three of which were unidentified victims. But there is little evidence to suggest that Kathy Harmon was one of Bundy’s unclaimed victims.
In February 2009, it was reported that a woman came forward with information concerning the Kathy Harmon murder investigation. The cold case had remained unsolved for decades, when a witness came forward to tell detectives about her then 20-year-old boyfriend in 1976, who came home one night with scratches on his face.
He told her his sister caused the scratches, but the woman said she never believed this excuse. She then told how her boyfriend returned home a week after the scratching incident, and recalled he was “quite upset” and “crying.” The woman said he had “told her that he had been with his friend (name withheld) and the two of them had picked up a girl at a party in Salt Lake City”
“Then took this girl up Emigration Canyon where they had sex with her… and left her there.” The woman said she remembers her boyfriend told her “she had been found, and he felt bad.” Curiously, despite the man’s admission of sexual rendezvous in the woods all those years ago, the women said she eventually married him.
The couple were still married into the present day when the woman made her statement, however over the previous few years their relationship turned into estrangement, according to sources close to the family. Within days of the woman’s claims, a warrant was issued to collect saliva samples from her 53-year-old husband, who resides in Taylorsville.
According to witnesses, the woman, who did not live at the Taylorsville address with her husband, was present when her husband was swabbed, and was “being treated (by paramedics) because she was having an anxiety attack.” Photos taken during the execution of the warrant possibly included images of the man’s Volkswagen van or a broken-down yellow Volkswagen Beetle.
Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Lt. Don Hutson confirmed that the yellow Beetle, which sits on the side of the man’s house, was not the same vehicle that the wife owned in 1976, a vehicle she told investigators her then-boyfriend drove “from time to time.” Detectives also reportedly took saliva samples from the husband’s friend from 1976, whom the wife also alleges may have been involved in the murder of Kathy Harmon.
Lt. Don Hutson, with the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office, said, “So some of the DNA testing may be items that were collected at the scene, at the time of the incident. There is also some evidence that we have collected since then that is also being analyzed. This is something that occurs in a lot of cold cases where we develop new information…”
“… and we have techniques available to us to make it possible for us to take the case in a new direction,” he explained. Lt. Hutson said that at the time Harmon’s body was found, it was difficult, due to the weather and terrain, to collect evidence at the scene because it was in a mountainous area.
“We would not open a case, or re-invigorate it so to speak, unless we felt there was something that would really work associated with the case,” Hutson said. He reiterated that at the moment, there were no plans to name the persons of interest in this case, because it was too early in the investigation to do so.
“There’s nothing imminent. In cold cases we want to take our time and not rush anything. They are very complicated and very complex. It may be weeks if not months before we actually come to a conclusion with this particular case,” he said. Since the announcement of the new potential suspects, no further updates were made on the Harmon case.
It seems that once again, the murder of Kathy Harmon has become a cold case. The Ted Bundy theory has remained as such, with little evidence pointing to his culpability, and it would seem much more likely that the death of Kathy Harmon was related to the violent and often unpredictable world in which her husband lived… the world of the outlaw biker.
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